373K Taps Internap for Bare Metal IaaS

Wholesale telecommunications service provider 373K is leveraging solutions from Internap (News - Alert) Corp. to optimize the cost efficiency of its infrastructure and to deliver the best possible voice experience for its customers, the companies revealed today.

As a February 2015 Internap blog explains, bare metal is a single tenant server, meaning only one party uses the server resources. This single-tenancy, the blog goes on to say, prevents others from negatively impacting performance on that service. The blog also discussed the difference between bare metal and hypervisors, and illustrates how bare metal servers can be used both with and without hypervisors.

In a recent interview, Kelvin Williams, 373K voice engineer, explained that Internap’s OpenStack solution was attractive because it includes an API that can hook in to 373K’s own switching solution, and the API allows it to spin up additional instances as traffic demands require – automating everything involved in updating servers. Voice traffic is unpredictable, he explained, especially around holidays like Valentine’s Day and Mother’s Day, when you know traffic will spike, but you are not sure how high. So having the ability to quickly add capacity can be very helpful, he indicated.

Being able to do that, using only the resources that are required at any time, and being able to monitor all the network resources involved not only expedites new capacity availability, it saves 373K on the order of a couple thousand to $10,000 a month, Williams said.

“Voice customers not only want, but demand, high-quality and reliable service when they place or receive a call,” said 373K CEO Mark Thomas. “This is one of the primary reasons we partnered with Internap when building this global platform. In addition to its uptime guarantees, global bare-metal IaaS presence and high-performance IP connectivity, Internap has enabled us to build a global platform that is relied upon by millions of end users daily.”

Internap was noted for its route optimized bandwidth offerings, which Gartner (News - Alert) said may be a good choice for customers with latency-sensitive applications such as the voice services 373K offers. This partnership ensures 373K is able to meet the voice service quality demands of its customers.